GameSpot reports a rumor by way of a video interview with MusiquePlus
(described by Wikipedia
as a "Canadian French language cable television music specialty channel") with
Eidos France director general Patrick Melichor that seems to reveal plans for a
sequel for Deus Ex, the action/RPG masterminded by Warren Spector during his
tenure at ION Storm. The interview quotes Melichor describing plans for 40
developers from Eidos' recently formed Montreal, Canada studio: "The first
mission for the team will be to bring back to life an extraordinary title called
Deus Ex." The other quote the article offers does temper this, however: "We're
still waiting for final confirmation [on the new Deus Ex], which should happen
in the next few months." GameSpot was unable to get an official comment on this
from Eidos.

I disagree about Thief 3. I never felt it lacked anything that made the first two games stand out. You still had plenty of player choices. I think Thief 3 kept most of what was best about the earlier games (namely, the atmosphere and overall "feel" of the game). Exploration was just a part of that (and there's still a decent amount in Thief 3). Deus Ex 2, however, lost much of what made the first game great.

The flaws in DeusEx 2 were largely a product of developing the game so that it would run in the memory constraints of an XBOX1. To attest to that, the tiny levels and very choppy framerate were once again represented in Thief 3 which used the same engine and was designed by the same group a year later. Both games removed what was best about the earlier PC games (exploration and lots player choices) to make a game for the xbox sadly.

If Spector has made the DeusEx sequel for PC only, I suspect it would have been a much better and much different game.

OneEye, I read an interview with Warren Spector once where he talked about how most of the Deus Ex development team did not like each other, and some members would simply not talk to others. Is that true? Was it the same way with Invisible War?

The first DX had some friction, which was in hindsight probably good. The IW the team for the most part got along fine. We had some extremely talented and hard working people.

The team tried to do too much and fell short. The shortcomings in the game were not for lack of effort.

OneEye, I read an interview with Warren Spector once where he talked about how most of the Deus Ex development team did not like each other, and some members would simply not talk to others. Is that true? Was it the same way with Invisible War?

Since it's Jerykk and venomhed more or less providing the BS arguments here, I'll just tell you two to piss off (v-hed you creamy little shit)

...wtf? I've had like three posts in here and none of them argumentative. Looks like you are still trolling, I see.

As for who to blame for DX2's suckage, it doesn't really matter. DX3's development will be by Ubisoft Montreal and Harvey and Spector won't be involved. I like Ubisoft Montreal. They've made a lot of good games. Can they handle a game like DX? We'll have to wait and see.

Well, seems someone has accused me of being a liar, particularly in the area of where I mentioned Harvey Smith was, in fact, in charge of DX:IW's production and that many of the design decisions for that game originated in Harvey's dissatisfaction with the original game. Look, there were a series of interviews with him and Specter published on various game sites after Deus Ex (first one) was released that spanned the years between DX's and IW's release. Go to planetdeusex to find a decent archive of these interviews, they're not hard to locate if you have the patience.

Second, I know, it's hard to accept that Harvey Smith was largely to blame for DX:IW. But that's just how it goes with leadership positions and realms of responsibility. He directly oversaw the game's production and had a far larger hand in it than Specter. Specter, if anything, is directly guilty of even letting Smith take charge in the first place as well as being rather supportive of the way IW turned out.

Both had their roles, but whereas Smith handled the day-to-day operations of IW's production, Specter is just guilty of poor judgment in letting Smith lead a team at all.

Since it's Jerykk and venomhed more or less providing the BS arguments here, I'll just tell you two to piss off (v-hed you creamy little shit). With Creston and Scottish here, it make the debate a little more valid, if not merely interesting.

In the end the game shipped and sold moderately well. Was it a great game? No. Did it stand up against DX1? No. It was however, despite its problems and shortcomings, a game that is better than most...

That was a pretty interesting read OneEye, thanks for putting that up. It puts a little perspective on the whole deal. I guess Harvey and the boys just should have kept their yap shut about the game, and not hyped it up so much. You were already making the sequel to what many people considered to be the best game ever. Pressure? Nah.But then it started getting hyped. Blatant LIES were told about it. (See my post below about the bullshit about the maps not being Xbox sized)

The game that was delivered would probably have been considered a pretty decent to good game, on its own. But that's not what you were making, you were making the sequel to Deus Ex. And for that, it wasn't good enough.

One of the things that pissed people off the most, though, was when the demo was released, and ran like fucking crap on the PC, because of all the Xbox settings in the .ini file. Within a day, that .ini file was completely torn apart and tweaked by the community. And what happened? You released the FULL game with the same Xbox bullshit in it. And then took like three weeks before you finally patched it.

The game development may have been brutally hindered by Eidos' incompetence, but that still doesn't justify the stupid interviews, the lies and the pathetic after-the-sale treatment of the PC community. (Who were basically told to "stop whining" about the game running - and looking - as shittily on a 3000 dollar PC as it did on a 200 dollar Xbox.)

Couldn't blame be assigned team-wide? After all the IW development team, with a few minor changes, was basically the same team that made Deus Ex.

Which, to me, would seem to indicate that the TEAM itself wasn't the problem. If you keep the same team, change the manager, and your new game suddenly sucks compared to the first one, hmmm... It is the manager or the team?

He often gets credited for the success of Ultima Underworld and System Shock 1 but those games's design can largely be credited to Doug Church

I never said he should have gotten credit for those, I give him credit for Deus Ex. It just seems weird to me that the man, having worked on SO MANY great titles, suddenly forgot what made a great game, and suddenly started saying so many crazy things, like how a one room RPG would be the greatest thing ever.

So did he snort too much detergent that year, or did something on his team change, but because he himself insisted on that change, he had to stick up for it? Ergo : Harvey Smith.

It's all conjecture on my part, but I read a few too many interviews with Mr Smith where he was bleating about shit like unified ammo to just give him a free pass.

Harvey Smith, among others, has made it pretty clear that they were not happy with the final product.

I won't call you a liar, since you typically are spot on with what you're saying, but I've NEVER read anything about Harvey Smith saying ANYTHING like that. The arrogant ass was always talking about how great all these changes were to his game.

It's funny, the Ex Deus : IW saga reminded me of something else : the development of Ultima 9. That's when EA insisted some fucker from Westwood came onboard (Ed DiCastillo, you may have heard of this clown), who proceeded to tell the community of Ultima fans (ie, people who had been playing these games for over a fucking DECADE) that Ultima was not about just wandering around a world, and going into people's houses, and baking bread. It was about jumping from one column to the next, Super Mario style.

Needless to say, the uproar that caused made the Ex Deus one look fairly small by comparison.

Another arrogant asshole who was going to tell the fans of a particular game what that game was about.Btw, Ultima 9 bombed spectacularly. As did Ex Deus.

The focus became less on creating a polished product that was worthy of the Deus Ex name, and more on finishing a game that was at the very least in a playable state. To do that meant cutting a lot of features, content and corners in a mad rush to get something, no matter how disappointing, out the door.

Meh, it's possible, but it's not what was said about the game in many many many interviews by people in their staff. While I suppose they wouldn't come out and say something to the tune of "Well, we're just trying to make something playable!" they seemed to be fairly adamant that they felt that all these changes were made because they were good changes to the game. And seriously, unified ammo? You can't tell me that was put in because their ENGINE was broken.

So who then do we blame?

Does it really matter? In the end, the game was horribly mediocre, and it WAS the sequel to the best game ever. I figured they would never equal the first one, would have been impossible to do (same thing happened for George Lucas when he tried to make 3 new Star Wars movies. How was any fan of the original 3 NOT going to be disappointed in the new ones? But that still doesn't forgive the stupidity of Jar Jar Binks,) they could have done a HELL of a lot better than they did.

And the thing that bugs me the most is all the blatant LYING Smith and his boys did. No, the maps were going to be giant maps on the PC, and they'd be broken up for the Xbox's pathetic hardware. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Repeat. Until a month before release, some map guy says "What? We never planned on having different maps in the game, that would have been a nightmare!"

While his point is understandable, the lying about it isn't.Harvey Smith was in charge. (Or at least, he was SUPPOSED to be. I doubt he could be in charge of his own freaking lunch money.) He was also the most visible, the most arrogant, and the most moronic of the people that worked on that game.That's why I piss in his cup, and not in somebody else's.

That said I think it is unfair to characterize him as incompetent or actively trying to develop a game that wouldn't please the originals fan base

But that is EXACTLY what he was doing! There must have been ten thousand threads on several dozen forums just HOWLING in agony about the fucking stupidity that was unified ammo (and really, the only reason I'm harping on and on about that is because it's a very visible flaw, it's really not the only thing that was wrong with the game. But it was one of their biggest mistakes.)What did Smith do? He kept defending HIS decision. How that decision was going to make this game SO MUCH BETTER. Did it? Ofcourse it didn't. So was he trying to please the original fanbase? Or was he trying to show that HE "knew better"?

Sounds to me like it was the latter. And that, in itself, makes him incompetent.

I doubt that, if someone other than Harvey Smith had been at the helm, we would've gotten that much better of a game.

Sadly, we'll probably never know.

Good argument Scottish. I think you and I have been debating Ex Deus : IW since the day the demo got released

Creston

Edit : As for the thing about the sales, fair enough. You remember seeing things that indicated the game did fairly well. I remember things that said it didn't (or actually, mostly that interview with Warren that said it didn't), but since we can't really get any definitive answers, I guess it's a bit of a moot point. If Eidos is considering making a third one, I guess they didn't do THAT badly.OneEye says it sold a total of a million copies, which is pretty damn good (though it includes the PS2 port.)

Btw, having said all this, I'll still be eager for the game to come out, just in the HOPE that it's like the first. However, if it's like the second, then I'll just skip it. And I SERIOUSLY doubt it's going to get anything of the name hype that IW got. Right now, a lot of people have a bad taste in their mouth from the name Deus Ex...

Eidos obviously hasn't been doing well since the late nineties, and simply did not have the money or the desire to fund such a significant development delay. As a result Ion had a broken engine, a bunch of features that weren't working right, Eidos' demand that the game be multi-platform, and a release date less than a year away. The focus became less on creating a polished product that was worthy of the Deus Ex name, and more on finishing a game that was at the very least in a playable state. To do that meant cutting a lot of features, content and corners in a mad rush to get something, no matter how disappointing, out the door.

that about sums it up...

With the first game, zero was expected from Eidos. The Ion Austin office was really an afterthought to Eidos management. Ion was really all about Dallas and the big glass office. The game Austin was making was barely on their radar.

Then came the success of the first game (DX1 with the PS2 version sold ~1,000,000 units world-wide), IW suddenly became a lead Edios title with AAA expectations. BUT - behind the scenes Eidos still thought of the original game as a non-mass market 'niche' title. No one at the top level understood the game, why it was popular, or how to market and sell it.

With Austin's success came Dallas's failure. Dikatana was a disaster and although Anacronox was a very good game its sales were abysmal. Warren, as part owner of Ion had to suffer for the problems to the north. The deal he came away with to keep the Austin team going was not advantageous to him or to the studio (my opinion here).

With AAA expectations from the publisher (and now with the team), certain risks were taken, especially on the graphical front. If you remember IW started as a Unreal Warfare title and about half way through development the engine was completely re-written to incorporate a Doom3 style renderer. This single change invalidated almost all of the 1.5 years of pre-production and map/game building that had gone into the title. Every map had to be re-done; giant parts of the game had to be cut. What was most infuriating was the changes that needed to be made weren't entirely evident at first.

Even worse, with the xbox as the lead SKU the already small maps had to be trimmed and trimmed to fit into a very small memory footprint.

Now you are thinking "those idiots, why would they take a very open DX-style game and try to shoe-horn it into a renderer that is made for small type spaces on a console without much memory?" That was the million dollar question and the problem that led to what the game became.

After the turmoil of the tech change, we were told that we had to have a killer demo ready for e3 2002. Because it was a 'niche' game to Eidos, we had to really be able to sell it for WalMart and BestBuy at the show. For the next few months massive crunch was put in. At e3 we took home several 'best of show' awards. We were stoked on one side, but on the other we knew that we had little of the game built and the Christmas 2003 deadline wasn't moving. You will remember that Eidos was in pretty rough shape at this point and there was no way they were going let us slip a AAA Christmas title.

That last year was the worst of my life, The team was in constant state of crunch. Everyone was working themselves into states of exhaustion. Eidos was breathing down our necks - we had to ship. More and more people where brought on to the team despite warnings of the 'mythical man month' syndrome. Tough choices had to be made, changes that would ultimately sacrifice the quality of the product. Sometimes things that most of team (including Harvey) held very dear had to be axed.

In the end the game shipped and sold moderately well. Was it a great game? No. Did it stand up against DX1? No. It was however, despite its problems and shortcomings, a game that is better than most...

Guessing doesn't mean anything. I could GUESS that Deus Ex actually sold poorly in 2000, and wasn't picked up by a ton of people until a year later, after it had been hailed as a great, great game by most people who played it.

And your guess would fly in the face of how the games market typically perform. Is it possible that Deus Ex only sold a few ten-thousands of copies in 2000 and that the majority of it's sales didn't come until later? Yes, it is certainly possible but that doesn't mean it's likely.

For whatever reason Gamespot no longer archives NPD data, so I cannot retrieve the sales figures for Summer 2000 and I am unwilling to purchase that data from NPD simply to win an argument. That said, I recall that Deus Ex was on top of the PC charts for the 3 weeks or so between it's release and Diablo II, and then continued to remain on the charts throughout the summer. I also distinctly remember a Daily Radar piece where they were talking about awesome vaguely gaming related jobs and how they could go wrong. One job was working in the Daikatana warehouse, where the lack of sales would mean you could sleep all day. The downside would be the potential for getting transfered to the Deus Ex warehouse. Here's a TTLG thread where the posters are also recalling that Deus Ex seemed to perform pretty well at the time of it's initial release: http://www.ttlg.com/forums/showthread.php?t=112657&highlight=Deus+Ex+Sales+FiguresThat hardly proves anything but it does indicate that the buzz on the internet was indicating that Deus Ex was doing pretty well.

So it may not have been a Blizzard release level hit, but at the very least it was selling fairly well and selling steadily throughout the summer. Combine that with the fact that most games tend to sell well for the first few months of release and then gradually peter out, it is far more likely that the 91,000 figure quoted above represents Deus Ex on the downward curve of it's product cycle, not it's apex.

Also consider that NPD only tracks North American retail sales in large stores; sales outside of North America, online, and in non-major stores are not tracked. Therefore the 91,000 represents only a portion of the total Deus Ex sales in 2001; the actual number is probably much higher. And remember if Deus Ex sales performance was anything even remotely like other PC titles, by 2001 the game was in the downward curve of it's product cycle. We are making guesses here, but these guess are based upon what is likely. The likely conclusion we can draw is that Deus Ex sold quite well, and while not a hit on the level of World of Warcraft, was profitable for all involved and was overall a commercially successful title.

If that wasn't Harvey Smith's fault, great. Then explain whose it was.

Couldn't blame be assigned team-wide? After all the IW development team, with a few minor changes, was basically the same team that made Deus Ex. You seem to have latched on to the change in project lead (From Spector to Smith) but if you're familiar with the role Spector tends to play in game development, you'll see that that wasn't the driving cause. Spector does not handle the nuts and bolts of development. He often gets credited for the success of Ultima Underworld and System Shock 1 but those games's design can largely be credited to Doug Church; Spector's role was, and continued to be with DX, largely managerial. Granted a good manager can make a world of difference, but in terms of hands on design decision making, that has never been what Spector has been involved in.

I don't know of any Ion employee that has, post-Ion, said that they were really pleased with the development of IW. Harvey Smith, among others, has made it pretty clear that they were not happy with the final product. What left such a sour taste in the collective mouths of the IW development team was all the problems that they had with the developing their own engine tech. Early on, they had made the decision to create their own next-gen engine, and to build that engine around the kind of gameplay they wanted to achieve. Fairly late in the development cycle, however, it became clear that the technology base they had built was not going to be able to support what they wanted to do. In fact, the engine was so broken, they asked Eidos for the time and money to scrap the existing engine and start over on the technology front. Eidos obviously hasn't been doing well since the late nineties, and simply did not have the money or the desire to fund such a significant development delay. As a result Ion had a broken engine, a bunch of features that weren't working right, Eidos' demand that the game be multi-platform, and a release date less than a year away. The focus became less on creating a polished product that was worthy of the Deus Ex name, and more on finishing a game that was at the very least in a playable state. To do that meant cutting a lot of features, content and corners in a mad rush to get something, no matter how disappointing, out the door.

So who then do we blame? Is it Eidos, for not funding a delay and demanding that the game be multiplatform? Is it Spector, for not lobbying hard enough to keep the game PC only and to secure additional funding? Is it the programming and engineering stuff, for developing broken technology? Is it the designers for making the wrong decisions on what to cut, and how to implement what wasn't cut, in the rush to get the game out the door? Or was it Harvey Smith for presiding over the whole mess?

I think it's fine to assign the blame to Smith as he was, after all, the project leader and therefore ultimately responsible for the finished product. That said I think it is unfair to characterize him as incompetent or actively trying to develop a game that wouldn't please the originals fan base. The development cycle simply went very badly wrong, for all of the above reasons, and given the circumstances I think the Invisible War that was released was about as good a product that could've been salvaged from such a cluster fuck of a development cycle; I doubt that, if someone other than Harvey Smith had been at the helm, we would've gotten that much better of a game.

I don't think so, but it's possible that interview came within a year of the game's release.

we can guess that several hundred thousand copies were sold in the US in 2000. Factor in world wide sales, online sales, and sales of repackaged versions of Deus Ex, 500,000 units sold is very conservative

Guessing doesn't mean anything. I could GUESS that Deus Ex actually sold poorly in 2000, and wasn't picked up by a ton of people until a year later, after it had been hailed as a great, great game by most people who played it.

Whose guess is more valid, yours or mine?

Warren Spector claimed that he wasn't very happy with the sales numbers of Deus Ex, and that Eidos was neither, that's why it was a fairly big risk for them to do a sequel and presumably one of the reasons they turned it into a crappy Xbox game.

You are a bit off on how things went and who was making the design choices about both games.

Just so you know, I was the Producer of IW and the DX series, so I have a bit of insight into how things really were.

Without actually telling us who you are, that's like me saying I'm the guy in charge of Starcraft II. Iow, it doesn't mean much.

If you WERE in charge of the entire DX series, mind telling us a bit more? Mind telling us how you managed to take a game that many considered the best game EVER, and were able to drag it down to "Mediocre to horrible console port?"

If that wasn't Harvey Smith's fault, great. Then explain whose it was.

You had probably one of the most eagerly anticipated sequels of all time on your hands, and you ROYALLY fucked it up. A few hundred thousand Deus Ex fans would really like to know why and how it happened.

Given that most games sell most of their copies during the first six months of release, we can guess that several hundred thousand copies were sold in the US in 2000. Factor in world wide sales, online sales, and sales of repackaged versions of Deus Ex, 500,000 units sold is very conservative; 500,000 units sold is pretty damn good for a PC game. With 1999-2000 level development costs, Deus Ex would've made a sizable profit for Ion and Eidos.

They improved on all the things in Deus Ex 1 that needed improvement, and threw out all the things that made it an awesome game.

After 10 minutes into the game, I no longer gave one crap about the story, except to find out what happened after the first game ended. After an hour, I no longer cared even about that, but only kept pushing to try to get trough the game. After a day, I could no longer bring myself to even play the game. It was quite possibly the most boring (and one of the buggier) FPS games ever created. (And I'm not hard to please on this matter - I still play Land of the Dead in multiplayer)

Everything that happened to me in DX2, I kept wondering "does this make any sense"? And the answer was, invariably, no.

Hopefully if there is to be a DX3, they attempt to make it like DX2 never happened, because that was just awful.